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Elluminate Phases In Learning Suite Upgrades

Ed tech developer Elluminate announced Tuesday that it's beginning a phased rollout of new versions of its Elluminate Learning Suite components, including Live V9 and Publish V2, as well as Elluminate vSpaces. New features are being rolled into these virtual learning applications now through December.

The Elluminate Learning Suite is an expanded collection of Elluminate's collaborative learning tools. It includes Elluminate's flagship Live e-learning software; Elluminate Publish, a tool used to create reusable learning content from Elluminate Live recordings; and Elluminate Plan, a tool designed to help instructors and instructional designers organize and package content for online sessions prior to the session being conducted live.

Elluminate Live is an e-learning, conferencing, and online collaboration tool designed for use in education. It includes features like note taking, two-way interactive video, archiving and automatic indexing of e-learning sessions, various tools for teachers (timers, pop-up announcements, sorting of participants by hand raising, etc.), whiteboarding, and various other collaboration tools. Live also provides integration support for a variety of open source and commercial learning management systems.

The new Live V9 and vSpaces will add several major enhancements over the previous release, including:

Integrated, "vendor-neutral" teleconferencing;

Session recording support for teleconferenced participants;

"Simultaneous multipoint video" in up to six windows;

"Synchronized instructor-controlled viewing"; and

Instant session invitations through e-mail or IM.

Both the multipoint video features and the instant invitation features are available now for hosted implementations of Live V9 and for the various vSpaces configurations, including vClass, vOffice, and vRoom. Other features will be available for the hosted configuration in December, according to Elluminate; all of the new features will be available for on-premises implementations in December.

Elluminate Publish is also being upgraded. The new Publish V2, also introduced Tuesday, will allow users to convert Live recordings into "rich video podcasts, which capture shared applications, whiteboard content, chat transcripts, closed captioning, and all audio, including telephony," according to Elluminate. Publish V2 will be available in December as well.

Further information about the new software can be found on Elluminate's site here.

About the Author

David Nagel is editorial director, education for 1105 Media's Public Sector Media Group and editor-in-chief of THE Journal. A 22-year publishing veteran, Nagel has led or contributed to dozens of technology, art and business publications.